Nautica's Sustainability Voyage

As a global lifestyle brand with a heritage and history with the water, Nautica continually strives to show our respect for water as a natural and life-sustaining resource by working to minimize the environmental impacts of our products and operations. In 2010, we established four focus areas around this vision: water; energy/carbon, waste reduction and education.

Water

Water is core to the Nautica brand and, as such, we have a clear responsibility to address increasingly scarce water resources and lack of access to clean water for more than 1 billion people. As a natural extension of that responsibility, we are committed to identifying our water footprints throughout our supply chain, protecting our oceans and increasing water availability for global communities and partnering with our consumers on water conservation. Since launching our corporate partnership with Oceana in 2009, the largest international organization dedicated solely to ocean preservation, we have become increasingly involved in efforts to reverse the declining health of marine eco-systems. We have also worked arduously to identify our water footprints by using an anchor Nautica product to better understand our biggest water impacts in the produce life-cycle as well as opportunities to reduce them. We strongly believe that we need to work together with others in the apparel industry, other industry sectors and leading non-governmental organizations to most effectively address the global water crisis. In March 2011, we joined the CEO Water Mandate, a public-private initiative designed to assist companies in the development, implementation and disclosure of water sustainability practices.

More Energy-Efficient Lighting Reduction

Climate change is not only creating severe disruption in weather patterns and natural habitats, but also greatly affecting freshwater systems and water availability around the world, leading to desertification, floods and melting glaciers. We also know that Nautica consumers feel a deep connection to water and concern for our planet. In 2009, we joined EPA Climate Leaders and worked with them to identify our Carbon Footprint for Nautica owned, operated and leased facilities. Since then we have been tracking our footprint on an annual basis. As a start, we have retrofitted two Nautica U.S. outlet stores with more energy-efficient lighting and will retrofit our distribution center in 2012. As we learn more about how our actions reduce our carbon impact, we will continue to make reductions in both our own operations as well as our supply chain.

Waste

In order to protect our oceans and beaches, we must be more aggressive in eliminating waste that contaminates them. From our Hudson River Clean-Ups to implementing 30% post-consumer recycled shopping bags and reducing garment polybag thickness, Nautica is continually working towards reducing our waste and making more efficient use of the world's resources.

Education/Employee Engagement

Education of our own associates, consumers, as well stakeholders, is central to the success of our program in truly integrating sustainability into everything we do. Nautica took an important step last year by establishing Blue Guidelines to require more environmental practices for our meetings, events and daily office activities. In 2011, we will build on our existing regular sustainability speaker series, by instituting mandatory sustainability workshops for all associates. We also established an employee engagement month to focus around the celebration of World Water Day on March 22nd, collectively raising funds to build a water project through Charity: Water, a non-profit organization bringing clean, safe drinking water to people in developing nations.

Looking Ahead

As we continue our voyage, we plan to share our progress and learn from other industry and NGO partners as to how we can best navigate the waters ahead. We know that this is an unchartered path and we must constantly re-evaluate how the way we do business impacts the earth, our oceans and global communities.